“Do I know you?” I said.
“I’m the hussy,” she said. “From your book.”
* * *
She was tall, with short hair the color of white gold, same as in the photograph. She’d run off and left my father and in so doing had forever altered the course of his life and, of course, mine. Their marriage, so reported my mother, nearly ruined Pop’s life, his prospects, his heart. This woman was one of the villains of my parents’ love story. I was told that she is, or was, a succubus, a monster, hair-sprayed evil. When Mom spoke of this woman—my mother, who has been known to pray for neglected houseplants—she grew brittle and tight. One heard thunder in the distance.
And yet, as soon as I saw her, I felt the bite of conviction. I shouldn’t have been so cavalier with the truth. Real people, even weirdos and evildoers, apparently, had feelings. My lust for comedy had burned too hot.
Summoning all my reserves of grace and good manners, I looked at this woman who could have, under different genetic circumstances, been my mother, and said, “Well, you don’t look like a hussy to me!”
She had a cocked grin, the lips twisted a little. Had she experienced a stroke? Oh, Lord Jesus in heaven, had I besotted the reputation of a stroke victim? She pushed the book closer to me, as though I might not sign it. My heart was bathed in shame.
“You must get your brains from your mother,” she said. “Your father sure was dumb.”
She said it right there in front of my father’s little sister, my father’s niece, his first cousins, my second.
They laughed.
They laughed.
I did not.
I heard thunder in the distance.
* * *
Hadn’t I written my book, in part, to lay bare the complexity of a family I’d never quite fully understood, and who, with every story, every remembered moment, showed itself to be more original and full of love and truth and pain than I’d thought possible?
Isn’t that why you tell stories, to understand the thing you’re telling?
It was not until I’d attached the 356-page, 89,452-word manuscript to an email to HarperCollins that I really got it. A book is not a report of something that happened in the past, whether that past is real or imagined: The book is the thing that happened. The writing is the action. The art is the knowing. Which is why you cannot write what you know. You can only really write what you want to know, and what I wanted to know was:
Who is my family?
Who is my father?
Who am I?
The very act of making is a kind of question. You don’t have to know you’re asking the question to make great art. The world is full of artists who have no reasonable idea why they’re doing what they do. The people who raked the Nazca Lines into black Peruvian topsoil probably did not read much critical theory, and fine: The heart is smarter than the brain. But at some point, if you end up thinking for long periods about your own art making, you will probably need to know what it is that powers the making, and what I think it is, is a combination of 5 percent talent and 95 percent curiosity. A desire to make, and by making, to know. You paint a painting to see what the painting will look like. If you knew before you started, why would you need to paint it?
Not money. Money’s why you go into commercial real estate. Money’s a courtesy the world throws at you to allow you to keep asking questions they are too busy to ask, given their vast treasuries of wealth, which have a way of filling one’s day with a whole different set of questions, such as, Would you like to see my boat?
* * *
I had spent more than a decade, nearly a third of my life on Earth, tunneling deep into the mountainside of memory, my rucksack loaded with questions, seeking what few precious gems of knowledge and wisdom might be hiding there, placing each gleaming insight into the pack on my back, climbing up the tunnel and then back down, deeper and deeper, every morning, every weekend, my lungs filling with blackness, fingers raw and worn, my family wondering where I’ve gone and when I’ll be back, while I sat in the dark, hunched with pickaxe and chisel, seeking the light of truth about my father and me, who we were and why and what we became and where we go now. And I had found the gem, the greatest one, I believed, and had carried it out by mule and train to the world, and in one hateful utterance—“Your father sure was dumb”—the woman at this Memphis bookstore, my father’s first wife, who’s probably very nice on your average day, took my questions and what treasures I had pulled from the earth and kicked them down into the endless tunnel and collapsed everything and laughed about it.
I didn’t know how to react: Everybody was still giggling. Part of me wanted to refuse to sign this woman’s book.
And God was like, Chill.
And I was like, I want to shame this lady.
And God said, She’s an idiot. Sign her book. Move on.
And I thought, I want to grow to enormous size and shoot lava from my fingers.
And God said, You cannot shoot lava from any part of you.
Can I slash her tires?
You have people waiting, said God.
Indeed, I’d called her a hussy in my book, and she probably wanted to spew lava on me, too, because if you write a book about real people and enough people read it, this type of thing is bound to happen. I couldn’t go getting sensitive now. You mine for precious stones, you get a little dirty.
I stood up and hugged her and tried to make it a real hug, which is hard for me.
“Thank you for coming,” I said. “It means a lot.”
“Oh,” she said. “I wouldn’t have missed it.”
* * *
That same weekend in Memphis, I stayed with my older half sister, Tanya. We share a father, but not a childhood. She was not in the book.
One of her greatest accomplishments happened when I was ten and she was seventeen and called our father to tell him she had just married a man who was twenty-seven, at which point my father sat speechless for thirty minutes, a world record. He put the phone down, and quietly explained to my mother what Tanya had done, and then he sat there in the recliner and stared out the window like a man who’d learned exactly what he’d just learned.
Finally, after half an hour, he spoke, a man rising out of a coma.
“Tell us about him,” Mom implored, trying to snap him out of it. “Where does he work?”
“McDonald’s,” Pop whispered. “He works at McDonald’s.”
Tanya and the older man’s marriage worked, for a time. She was not with child, as was suspected. Eventually, they had two sons, then divorced. The boys had grown up with their father, far away. The children were adults now, off somewhere in Texas. I had these two nephews I didn’t know at all, and a sister I also didn’t really know. Family’s weird like that.
My sister was mostly alone, at night, on holidays, and maybe for the first time in my life, that seemed sad to me. It had taken writing a memoir to recognize feelings that had been lying there, waiting to be felt my whole life.
Tanya is funny, in many ways, thoroughly and completely guileless, probably the most perfectly transparent human I’ve ever known who’s not under the age of seven. No thought is secret with Tanya. She’s like those Antarctic jellyfish whose central nervous system you can see. The good news is, she won’t lie to you, which is also the bad news. For example, the day she arrived in Savannah for Pop’s funeral, she walked into Mom’s apartment, my mother’s eyes red with endless weeping, and looked around and said, “Oh, God, I hate those blinds.”
This is what we love about Tanya.
When I arrived at her house in the midst of my tour, not having seen her since the funeral a year before, expecting, I don’t know, an embrace, a smile, something after my long drive on a hot June day, in which I’d driven hundreds of miles with the windows down, she opened the door and said, “You look dirty.”
“I just drove five hundred miles with the sunroof open,” I said.
“I hate sunroofs.”
I’d forgotten how mu
ch she likes to hate things. We caught up, discussed all the things she hates in addition to sunroofs. When I asked about local coffee shops, where I might get a little work done, she informed me that she hates coffee. I asked if she had any beer, to which she replied that she also hated alcohol of any kind, especially beer.
“What about wine?”
“Oh, God. I really hate wine.”
“Do you hate joy?” I asked.
“What does that mean?”
“It’s a joke.”
“I don’t hate joy,” she said.
“Coffee and wine bring me joy,” I said.
“Jazzercise brings me joy,” she said.
* * *
I tried to put her in the book. She was there, in a few chapters. Debbie said to take her out, said it was too distracting, this minor character with a different mother who lived in a different house across town. So I took her out. I cut my half sister out of family history. It felt cruel. But Debbie was right. Tanya’s story was not that story.
“Are you recording this?” my sister said. “Is this going to be in your next book?”
“Maybe,” I said. “Can I write about you? You wouldn’t mind?”
“I don’t care,” she said.
“I will make fun of you,” I said, “but I will try to do it with love.”
“Maybe it will help me get a man.”
“That’s the spirit.”
“I love hot guys.”
That’s one thing she doesn’t hate—hot guys.
We spoke about her love of hot guys, and where hot guys might be located.
“Probably not at Jazzercise,” I said.
She was married at seventeen. She was now forty-seven. I knew it must be hard.
“There’s always church,” I said.
“I tried church,” she said.
“I bet you hate it.”
“I do.”
I couldn’t argue with that. Churches can be frightening places, full of friendly old people.
We went for a walk together in the unshaded heat of an early evening. I generally find brutal heat to be a tonic, a cleanse. I like it. I needed it, after the psychological torments of my turbulent and emergent fame. It struck me in that moment that I’d never walked anywhere with my sister, really. Ever. Maybe Opryland, once, eons ago? I felt deeply and strangely happy, walking with her, talking about her marriage, about that day she called Pop to break the news. She told me everything. I said a little prayer of thanksgiving that art had made this moment possible.
“I like walking,” she said.
“I’m surprised,” I said. “I would assume you hate to sweat.”
“I don’t sweat.”
“Oh.”
“I hate not sweating,” she said.
All of us are looking for something—success, greatness, hot guys, thin hot pagan guys, girls, readers, bestseller news, fame, glory, riches, sweat. Maybe these are all just different names for love. I had begun to miss my family.
* * *
The day after my reading in Memphis, Tanya gave me a thick stack of pages.
“This is my memoir,” she said.
“You wrote a memoir?”
“It’s about the foibles of being single,” she said.
“There’s a big market for foibles.”
“It’s probably crap,” she said. “I hate writing.”
“Of course you do,” I said. “Can I quote the funny parts in my next book?”
“Sure.”
What might I find in there? Something terrible about her or our father? Would it reveal sexual abuse? Demons? Dark secrets? In that moment, frozen terror surged through my heart: Is this what it felt like to be one of my family members, knowing a book had been written about us? It was a little terrifying, for I knew my sister would not lie in it.
Later that day, when I was alone, I began reading it.
I had underestimated my sister.
It was, without a doubt, the most beautiful memoir I have ever read.
She wrote just like she spoke.
SOME OF MY FAVORITE LINES FROM MY HALF SISTER’S MEMOIR
Men are sexual beings.
Not all men are perverts.
I gladly accepted the gifts because bras and panties are costly.
The very first date was with a biker guy who was handsome and had celiac disease and spoke about why he was eating only the meat on his hamburger. One guy had really pretty blue eyes but could not converse for anything plus he had a criminal record. They supposedly did background checks on each one of us, Hum!
I met one guy without ever seeing his photo, which will never happen again. He told me he was attractive, but he was not. Who told him that, his mother?
I’m never interested in looking at their penises.
It’s their nature to want stability and be loved, not just fornicate.
This book was a marvel of unvarnished truth. I told her she should title it Don’t Look at the Penises! Perhaps Debbie would be interested? It could be a Broadway musical, even, rollicking and cautionary. Her trademark candor permeates every line. It took me twenty years to write like that. Why had she written it? For the same reason anybody writes anything, I guess: She was just trying to talk to someone, to be less alone, to ask questions, to find the gems of wisdom in her own dark earth, to determine the answers to life, the universe, everything.
There in her driveway, on my way to another book event, in another city, in another part of the state, I rolled down the window to let out the stale hot air.
“Goodbye,” I said to my sister. “I love you.”
I had never said this to her before, but something about her book made me want to say it. I felt like I understood some little piece of her, for the first time. We were not so different. I also hated things and wrote them down in a book, for others, the way she had for me.
“Love you, too,” she said.
We hugged through the window, and I drove away.
Chapter 17
You will become way less concerned with what other people think of you when you realize how seldom they do.
—DAVID FOSTER WALLACE, Infinite Jest
MANY YEARS AGO, WHEN WE LIVED IN NEW ORLEANS, MY wife met Jude Law. She and her sister were driving down Magazine Street and there he was, a god, those eyes blue as glacial melt, and that face, threatening to overheat the polar ice caps, globally warming the loins of our planet, People’s Sexiest Man Alive.
“Stop the car,” Lauren said to her sister.
He was in town filming All the King’s Men, if I recall.
This gesture of visible desire was quite uncharacteristic of my wife, who rarely chases anything that has not been recently united with margarita mix. But there she went, calling his name out like they were lovers.
“Jude!” she said. “Jude, is it you?”
She hotfooted it half a block and found herself lifted off the ground, carried toward Jude Law by the tractor beam of his chin. She hovered there, staring, wanting, and trying not to touch his face, like he was Jesus. She got his autograph. She may have volunteered to bear one of his children. The details are spotty.
This is one way to measure a certain kind of worldly success in publishing or film or professional sports: Are strangers getting lost in your eyes on the street? Are people accosting you in public and demanding you provide evidence of having met them, commanding you to pose for a selfie or provide an autograph, a lock of hair, or one of your fingers? It varies by fan.
Two months into my book tour, minor variations of these incidents were growing more common, selfies, autographs, sweaty handshakes. I had even been chased down the street, in Sewanee, Tennessee. I was walking topless, and the various young musicians of the Sewanee Summer Music Festival stared, because they believed I was dying of some rare skin disease, which I might’ve been.
“It’s a fungus,” I said to passersby. “It’s harmless.”
From nipples to navel, my torso looked like a map of the Lesser Antilles. I nor
mally would’ve been clothed, but my nipples need light and air to thrive. Just then, as a coterie of young flautists appeared to laugh and point at my skin malady, I heard a voice exclaim, “Harrison Scott Key! Is it you?”
The voice came from the mouth of a comely young woman, stopped in the middle of the street, in a small blue car. She got out, carrying a copy of my book.
“Yes?” I said, wishing I’d brought along a towel or at least an oriental folding screen to cover myself.
“Will you sign this?” she said, trying not to look at me.
I signed her book and she departed.
The flautists stared with more respect, I felt. I waved, and they moved on.
* * *
Walking back to the Sewanee Inn, I felt altered, my body aquiver with the potentialities of being adored. I needed to stay humble, yes, of course, for the meek shall inherit the earth. Was it possible to be accosted by a fan on the street and remain meek? I was merely trying to get the book wedged into the hard blackjack oak of America’s unconscious, so that it might live there forever and contribute to whatever interior and imaginative life this nation yet nourished. Could one do that and also inherit the earth?
I called Lauren to tell her.
“It’s just like what happened to you and Jude,” I said.
“Jude did not have fungus,” she said.
“I love you,” I said. “I miss you.”
“Don’t let too many sexy girls see your fungus.”
I had to explain to her that my fans were mostly librarians with bad teeth, which was actually preferable. Librarians asked the best questions, seemed the happiest ones to be standing in the book-signing line.
I was growing quite familiar with the heft of a Sharpie. Bookstores and auditoriums had become, somehow, over the course of the summer, as if by magic, reliably half-full. Never before had I been presented with so many gifts! How kind America turned out to be! Shirts, hats, rice, chocolate, wine, whiskey, scotch, rum, beer, tomatoes, squash, hot peppers, hot sauces, books, paintings, concert tickets, gift certificates, cigars, bowties, neckties, cash prizes, rugs, mugs, a commemorative pen with my name printed on it. I found it all remarkable. Often these gifts were homemade, pottery pieces and embroidered handkerchiefs and leather belts with my name already branded into them, which made me believe the people who made them probably had access to tanning chemicals and a dungeon. This is one of the most exciting parts of being famous, meeting people who wish to embalm you for their terrarium.
Congratulations, Who Are You Again? Page 17